Twelve
September 14, 1998
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
“You have the right to speak with a lawyer and have him present during questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, the court will appoint one for you free of charge . . . which they’ve already done.”
Investigator Jose Aceves read the Miranda advisory to the prisoner in the small interview room at the Jefferson County Detention Center. William Lee Neal had called asking to talk without his lawyer, Jim Aber, whom he’d fired for the television cameras and later reconsidered, being present and waived his rights immediately when they arrived that morning, as he was anxious to get to “the truth.” Neal probably had already dug his own grave with his tape-recorded confession and statements that he’d made to investigator Cheryl Zimmerman, as well as several he’d made since to the police and media. But Aceves, a short, barrel-chested detective with jet-black hair and a Fu Manchu mustache who’d been the lead investigator at the West Chenango scene, and Zimmerman, a nine-year veteran who’d talked Neal into surrendering and was also present in the interview room, were taking no chances that this interview would be tossed out on a technicality. There were still a lot of questions that they wanted to ask Wild Bill Cody Neal.
For one thing, they were still unclear regarding how he knew the victims, and whether the victims knew each other. And what ruse had he used to get them all into the town house on West Chenango?
There was also a question as to whether he had committed other murders. He’d claimed to have killed as many as “five hundred others” and that there were bodies that they had not yet discovered. He’d retracted the statements, but they had to assume that he might have been telling them the truth, or at least some of the truth, before changing his mind. No one believed his more fantastic claims, but he had proven he was quite capable of killing multiple victims over a period of time. It was also difficult to believe that at age forty-two he’d suddenly “snapped,” as he now claimed, and started cooly, calmly murdering innocent women. The crimes seemed too well planned and calculated for a first-timer.
Three were dead and whatever the investigators knew about their relationship with him came from the women’s families. The fourth woman, the one he’d raped, had told them how he’d brought her into the town house with a ruse about showing her a “surprise” for her roommate. In graphic detail, she had recounted his cold-blooded efficiency in killing the third victim, Angela Fite, and lack of remorse—while they shook their heads over the courage she had shown throughout the ordeal. But she knew little about him.
The necessity of learning more about his past would be important if Neal was convicted and then faced a death penalty hearing. At such a hearing, defense lawyers would be expected to present evidence of “mitigating circumstances”—or mitigators—in their attempt to save his life. Mitigators often involved such explanations for criminal behavior as an abused childhood, physical injury that might have caused brain damage, or even a defendant’s youth and lack of prior criminal history or history of violence. Neal was already claiming that his brutality was out of character for him, perhaps a first step toward an insanity plea.
The investigators had learned a lot about Neal’s past and character from his family. He’d been born on October 7, 1955, in Virginia. His father had been in the air force and the family had soon moved to San Antonio, where he’d spent the better part of his youth. But he had been secretive from even his family for years.
One of his sisters, Sharon, a former social worker, was sticking by him . . . at least to the point of insisting that he must have been insane to do what he did and therefore not legally accountable for his actions. It was clear that she didn’t want to provide any information that might harm her brother. But his other siblings—brother Phil and sister Peggy—were very helpful.
They described their brother as having spent his childhood as their mother’s favorite, her “golden boy” who could do no wrong, even when as far back as his childhood there was plenty of evidence that he could. They reported instances of animal abuse, one of the telltale signs of a serial killer in the making. He’d claimed in an earlier interview with investigators to have been molested by an older, married woman while a young teen; his family, who knew the woman in question, patently denied the affair existed anywhere but in his mind. However, it was true that he had sexually molested a younger girl at about that age.
His second wife, Karen Wilson, had mentioned that while living with him near Nashville, Tennessee, there had been stories about murdered women whose bodies were found wrapped in plastic. They’d been unable to get anything concrete on that. Neal’s own family revealed that he’d also been the subject of an investigation into the abduction, rape, and murder of a twelve-year-old girl in upstate New York many years before. The investigators knew that the FBI had been called in on that one, but Neal had denied any involvement, and without more to go on, he’d been free to walk. Even now, the police in Pueblo, 120 miles south of Denver, wanted to question Neal about a brutal murder there. But so far, they had not been able to link any more unsolved homicides or disappearances to Neal. So far.
A week after his arrest, Neal had been charged by Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas with thirteen crimes, including first-degree murder, first-degree sexual assault, kidnapping, extortion, and theft. Though it might have seemed like overkill, considering a conviction for first-degree murder could result in the death penalty, proving the lesser charges might bear on whether Neal would qualify for the “ultimate punishment” due to his having committed the murders either during, or to conceal, another felony.
Neal had kept Jim Aber as his public defender for the time being, though he frequently threatened to fire him for trying to defend him from the charges. Not that Neal paid much attention to his lawyer’s advice. He was bound and determined to take “full responsibility,” as if that were some noble gesture on his part.
As Jose Aceves finished reading Neal his rights, the killer nodded impatiently. “I understand that fully, and I agree with it.” He looked pale in the fluorescent lighting and a bright orange jail jumpsuit. He still wore his hair long, though he’d added a dark goatee since his arrest two months earlier.
“Did anyone from our office ask you to come talk to us?” Aceves asked.
“No, not at all,” Neal replied.
“Mr. Neal, you haven’t been threatened or coerced in any way to come down and talk to us?”
“No, no, sir,” Neal said, shaking his head. “This is totally voluntary, not out of fear or anything like that. You guys have totally respected me the whole time I’ve been with you. That’s another reason why I’m comfortable in talking with you . . . because of how you have handled things with me during this time that we’ve been in this situation.”
Neal began the interview trying to butter up Cheryl Zimmerman by complimenting her on her appearance. But she cut quickly to the chase. “What is it you wanted to talk about, sir?”
First Neal cryptically said that he hoped they would get a message through to an agent with the FBI “relating to certain, what I believe are federal, issues, if worse comes to worse, if I don’t have any other choice. I am considering what I’d like to say . . . and then they can do with the information whatever way they choose.”
The investigators assured him that they’d been in contact with the FBI and would pass his messages along. But that wasn’t their main concern. Zimmerman asked him to go over the day that Angela Fite had died.
Before he got started, Neal cautioned the investigators that he might not be able to remember everything “not because I’m hiding something. . . . It’s just the act, I mean, the whole scene is such a nightmare to me as well.”
Zimmerman asked him to try to remember the day at least from when he’d picked up Suzanne Scott. Neal described again how he’d asked her to go with him to the town house on the pretense of showing her “a surprise” for Beth Weeks. “I might have said I had something else to pick up at the house.
“I had a certain way that I wanted to—she was going to be the one presenting that surprise to Beth Weeks because I was going to be out of town to Vegas, and I wasn’t going to be able to do it for her.
“So that’s why she was willing to let me blindfold her when we got into the garage, as well as put duct tape on her mouth, which I was gentle about doing. It was totally voluntary on her part as well.”
“Were her hands bound in any way?” Zimmerman asked.
“Oh, no, no,” Neal said. “She came of her own free will on the understanding that what we were doing was legitimate. I mean, you know, if I had told her I’m going to take you to the house, and I’m going to tie you down, and I’m going to rape you, and you’re going to witness a murder, she’s not going to go.” Seeing the look on Aceves’s face, he added, “I mean, I’m not being sarcastic with you at all, Jose.”
Neal said he led the way into the house because “I was always so worried about the little kitty cat getting out.”
Scott trusted him enough, he said, that she lay down on the mattress without protesting. “I just said, ‘This is how I want you to do the surprise with Beth.’ . . . They always knew how crazy I was.” Again catching the investigators’ looks, he quickly added, “I don’t mean crazy, I feel, in a bad way. I was always kind of like fun, and I would do things people wouldn’t seem to do, just partying and enjoying myself.” His unknowing victim didn’t complain, either, when he tied her arms and legs down.
“So then you tied her up, and then what happened?” Zimmerman asked. So far, his story was the mirror image of Scott’s.
“Then I started taking her blouse off,” he said. “She felt at that time that she was going to be . . . I believe she felt like she was going to be raped.”
“Did she say anything?”
Neal shrugged. “She muttered a few things like, ‘No.’ Or started to be upset. And I said, ‘If you want to live, you’re basically going to have to listen to what I have to say.’ ” He noted that he’d read Scott’s statement to the police. “I would like to say that I believe that she was totally honest and totally accurate except for certain timing issues. . . . Like something comes to me . . . It might have been on the news or things I’ve read that said Angela Fite watched me rape Suzanne Scott, which is totally not true. I had never done that to Angela, okay? . . . As far as the news, they don’t have a stinking clue, all right?”
“They never do,” Zimmerman agreed.
“You know,” Neal said, “I’m facing death row. . . . I’m facing the end of my life for what I know that I’ve confessed, and I’m fine with doing that over and over again. I want the truth to be out. But I find it real difficult for me to see people, even my own flesh and blood, that have lied or added to something that was not true.
“I’m not saying that I’m always truthful with things. I mean, I have not been that way in my life. . . . I’m not trying to judge them, either, but I do have a problem with it, mainly because I believe it takes away from the investigation, and it’s putting something on me I don’t deserve. I’ll eat what’s mine but nothing else.”
When the investigators began asking questions, they addressed him as Mr. Neal, until he insisted that they call him Cody. Some of their questions he answered directly; with others he took off on tangents—all the while, his hands flew around like a pair of disturbed birds. He would flit from subject to subject, often following no particular order and it was everything the investigators could do to keep him on track as he told his story. He described showing Scott the body of Rebecca Holberton covered in black plastic.
“Did you say anything to her at that point?” Zimmerman asked.
“I let her know that if she screamed or drew attention to herself, she would die,” he answered. “She wasn’t hysterical.”
The investigators nodded; they were already duly impressed by how well Scott had held herself together under horrific circumstances. Still, Aceves thought that at some point after being shown Holberton’s or Walters’s body, the girl had screamed.
Neal shook his head. “She was not screaming. She never screamed the whole time she was with me. And if she recalls that she did, she did not.
“I mean, the only real tense time for Suzanne with me was in the beginning when I got on top of her, and I settled her down right away. And then I took the blindfold off to reassure her that murder was definitely an option. I wanted her to live, and she was going to have to trust me that she would live. But she was going to have to follow exactly what I said.”
“What was her reaction to seeing these two people?” Zimmerman asked.
“I’m not a doctor,” Neal noted. “Just my observation was I believe that she was in shock, but not bad shock. She was still in control of her senses. She was aware of what was going on.” He took a deep breath and added, “I believe part of it is because Suzanne trusted that I would get her out of there alive, even after she saw the bodies.”
Neal said he removed the duct tape from Scott’s mouth so that she could talk to him. “So that I could understand, you know, what she’s going through a little bit more. I mean, I know that might sound bizarre to you, my concern for a victim, but believe me it was a concern because she was a beautiful young lady. She never did nothing wrong to me at all.”
If Neal’s rationale sounded bizarre to the investigators, they didn’t let it show on their faces. “Why did you choose to do this to Suzanne?” Aceves asked.
“As a warning,” Neal answered. “And at this time, I don’t want to go further into that, but it was a warning to other people to keep their mouths shut.”
Aceves pressed to know who these other people might be and why they needed to be warned. But Neal was coy and refused go any further, other than to say the investigators “should be concerned.” There was a strong possibility, he said dramatically, that he was “going to get hit. And I have a real concern about it. Not because I’m scared to die. It’s not that. But I’m scared that I’ll die before I can get the truth out.” His warning, he said, was meant for some of his acquaintances, especially Jimmy Gerloff. “I hope he takes it serious and you do; this way I wash my hands of it. I can’t be there to protect him. . . . I believe there’s a possibility Jimmy Gerloff will die, and I don’t want that on me.” He hinted darkly that some of the danger might be connected to the drug trade.
Neal turned to the matter of picking up Angela Fite that evening at Fiddlesticks. It was his suggestion, he said, that she take the kids to the baby-sitter before meeting him. “I wanted to make sure the children were in no way directly involved in the scene. And I’d like to make a statement for the record for myself to you that there was no intention of harming Kayla or Kyle in any way. The purpose in getting them to the baby-sitter was to make sure some adult was taking good care of them so that they were not involved in this thing with Angie.”
Having tried to make himself sound somehow noble for not involving the children, he told the investigators that when Angie got into his truck for the drive to the town house, he told her that she was going to “meet some friends, family, and that we were going to go over to this house that I had talked to her about.”
The investigators were curious though about who the mysterious friends and family might have been. Neal avoided those questions and noted that he’d also led her to believe that she was going to own the town house. “I let her know with what I said that I did not want anyone knowing, her family or her friends or Matt or anybody other than herself knowing that she was going to be getting a house. That she would die if she disclosed that information.”
Beth Weeks told investigators that Neal had said to her that he’d killed Fite because she was reconciling with Matt Rankin. But Neal denied that he was jealous. He said that he’d told Fite that “if her and Matt ended up wanting to get back together, that was fine,” but he didn’t want anybody to know that the house was coming from him.
“And what I found out before she died was that she had been running her mouth about that and a few other things as well. And that’s one of the reasons why Angie died. Fair warning. . . . She brought up that she didn’t believe that I was totally legit, meaning that I was involved in bad things. She said she had been around things because of Matt’s jail record and things . . . that she could handle it, and that she would never disclose anything that her and I did.
“Candace never saw Rebecca’s body, you see, before she died because she would have leapt out of there and fought like a cat.
“But Angie, I allowed her to see it and also see that there was somebody there living. I wanted to confront her. She was going to die for opening her mouth. . . . That’s why Jimmy Gerloff is going to die, and that won’t be because I’m the one. If I could stop it right now—that’s what I’m trying to do—I would do it.”
Neal claimed that he told Fite, “Because you’re a snitch, you die” before he killed her. It was a claim that he’d never made before and one that Scott had not remembered. He continued with his new fantasy of having given fair warning. “I mean, I can’t give you any clearer warning than that. And she did, and she died.”
Aceves interrupted. The investigator wanted to pin Neal down on his frame of mind at the time of the killing, an important issue when trying to convict him of premeditated first-degree murder. “What’s going through your mind?”
“I’m very clear and calm,” Neal replied. “I was totally comfortable.” When he was out picking up Fite, he was a little worried about Scott being discovered, “but I wasn’t bouncing off the wall. . . . Angie couldn’t even tell anything was wrong with me.”
“Was it like an adrenaline rush?” Aceves asked.
“No, it wasn’t an adrenaline rush there,” he said. “The adrenaline rush would come when I would kill somebody, like being a Highlander.” (Highlander was a movie and television show in which the hero, an immortal who has been alive for hundreds of years, must fight other immortals who sought to absorb his life force and he theirs.) “You know, he feels when he just sits there and he kills somebody, and he raises his hand.
“I’m not being funny about it. I’m just saying that in order for me to deal with killing . . .” Neal stopped and searched for the right words. “These three murders were not like that with me, OK? This was different to me, all right? Because I cared about them.”
Zimmerman asked if he thought that he was a controlling person. “You know, I’m learning about that issue right now,” he said, nodding. He said that he’d read where his sister Peggy told the investigators that “nobody controls Bill,” and acknowledged that was probably correct.
“But I don’t think in an evil sense. I’m a strong-willed person. I mean, if somebody has to make a decision, let it be me, because right or wrong, I’m going to make it. Somebody has got to be a leader.”
“That’s right,” Zimmerman agreed, wanting him to go on.
“I was trained that way,” Neal boasted. “But I was also hurt that way, being a sheep and taking it and then saying: ‘Enough, I’m not [to] be led no more. Nobody is going to rape me no more. Nobody is going to hurt me no more. Nothing. OK? And if you do, you die.”
Neal changed the subject to note that he wasn’t happy with some of the things that he’d been reading in the press about his case, or some of the things that his family and past acquaintances had told the police. He said that it was the press who misrepresented his service record, contending that he never told reporters that he was a member of the elite Airborne Rangers, something that had since been disproved. “I said I was with an Airborne Ranger company,” he said. “I didn’t lie. I was there and trained with them and went to the field with them. I did everything while waiting to go to Ranger school.”
Neal said his army career was cut short when he was only seventeen after being raped by his sergeant. The incident, he claimed, happened one evening after he’d returned to the barracks following a hard day in the field. “I was exhausted, and he told me I could finally lay down and go to sleep. I was lying on my stomach, and I woke up to having him on top of me.”
Neal said that he didn’t want to discuss what happened any further. He noted that while Suzanne would be “getting therapy for a long, long time” for what he had done to her, nobody had ever offered the same counseling to him. It was because of the rape, he said, that he decided to drop the Airborne Ranger idea and go elsewhere. “Because of the rape, I chose to go elsewhere because everybody was calling me a faggot and I was fighting. I was beating people up.”
The rape in the army wasn’t the first time he’d been sexually assaulted, Neal said, getting back to the story of the older, married woman who’d taken advantage of him as a boy. There’d also been a minister who molested him. He conceded again that he’d turned the tables and molested a younger girl.
After several hours, Neal asked for a coffee break. When they returned and the tape recorder started up again, Neal asked the investigators how they could sleep at night. “I’m not trying to be nosy or disrespectful,” he said. “It’s just that, you know, it’s enough of a horror for me, let alone what you see in your everyday jobs.”
Aceves shrugged. “You deal with it and you do what you need to do,” he said. “It’s part of your job, and you learn to keep it separate from your home life.”
Neal nodded. “This past couple of months has been a real eye-opener for me,” he said. “But I haven’t run from it. That’s one thing they’ll never take from me. I didn’t run from it.” He congratulated the investigators on their professionalism, but he did wish that the next time they met, they’d bring him a pack of cigarettes. Merit 100s. He promised he would “really open up” if they brought the cigarettes.
Zimmerman cut through the banter by asking Neal to tell her, “Who is Cody? . . . I want to know the whole story. You know, part of it is my own personal curiosity. . . . There’s a lot that’s gotten you to this point in your life. We can get some of it from other people—family, friends, your military records, and so on. But there’s a lot of it, Cody, that I can’t get except out of your head and your heart.”
Neal liked this approach. He nodded and, choking up, said, “I want that, to be honest with you.”
Aceves jumped in, saying that the FBI wasn’t going to get more involved unless Neal could “throw them a bone,” give them some exact incidents rather than just his hints that there might have been other crimes, other victims.
Neal hedged. He wanted all that, too, he said. But he had other things to consider . . . other lives and the possibility that the police would “drop the ball” and the truth would be lost. Whatever that meant. He said that he couldn’t talk to his defense lawyer “about all of this because he’s trying to defend me.
“I need prosecution. I need justice to be served because I’m representing three dead people, as well as a rape victim. I want justice to be served and the truth to be known so that people can get on with their lives. And that’s why we’re here today.”
Aceves tried to steer Neal back to how he was able to get the women to trust him so well. “Cody, you mentioned control. . . . How did Cody manage to control?”
Neal replied that he sometimes controlled people by molding himself to be what they wanted or needed him to be. “It’s like if you want a raise, you’re going to have to look a certain way, do your job a certain way, smile at a certain person instead of saying, ‘You stinkin’ asshole’ when you want to. Or you let somebody think you like them when you don’t. . . . I mean, an illusion, taking advantage, finding a weak point in a human being—you know, greed, lust . . . to get my own way.”
Zimmerman asked what weaknesses he found in Rebecca Holberton, but Neal shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about Rebecca Holberton at this time, OK?” he said, his voice cracking with emotion.
“Were you closer to her than the others?”
“Oh, yeah,” he replied. “I don’t want to lose it talking about Rebecca.” But, of course, then he went on and talked about her. He claimed that they had sex at the party where they met, and he moved into her town house on West Chenango Drive soon thereafter. Four months later, the relationship was no longer sexual. They sometimes still shared the same bed, or he’d sleep downstairs, he said, “but we were just friends.”
“What was Candace’s weakness?” Zimmerman asked. “I mean, what did you find weak about her that you could manipulate?”
Neal hesitated, then said, “First of all, I’m not saying that I manipulated Candace Walters, OK? I honestly liked Candace Walters, and I’m talking about at the beginning when I met her.
“I found her to be a charming lady, along with the other bartenders that have worked there. We had a really beautiful conversation just sitting in that little booth there when she was off. . . . She was easy to talk to. Then as I got to know her, I found a very troubled person, which I could relate to because I’ve been very troubled in my life, too.”
“What do you think she was troubled about?” Zimmerman asked.
“I think she was troubled about men . . . how she had been treated by them in the past. . . . She had told me she had been raped. . . . Whether you want to believe that or not, I’ll swear to [it] that Candace felt she was raped by Jimmy Gerloff.” He said the accusation was a warning to Gerloff. “Jimmy, you’ve got to own up. You did something you shouldn’t have done with a woman that said no and meant no. No means no.”
Aceves steered him back to how he controlled Walters.
“Candace saw me with a lot of money,” he answered. “I always like throwing it and giving it because I remember what it felt like when I didn’t have it. . . . And look at me now, you know, I can’t hardly even get a stinkin’ stamp. All those people I took care of, and then where are they? I mean, nowhere. They’re like, poof, gone, including my family. Steve Grund . . . He promised to be over here, and he ain’t here, OK?”
The investigtors noted that Grund and the others might be witnesses in the case and therefore shouldn’t have contact with him. Neal said he’d thought that might be the reason, too.
In the beginning, he only intended his relationship with Walters to be a “platonic friendship.” He was not sexually attracted to her. But after the incident with Gerloff, both to protect his friend and to show Walters that “not all men are pigs,” he took her to a hotel room and treated her to a bubble bath. “And there was no sexual contact that night.”
The relationship changed, Neal said, after Walters began “stalking” him. “She started calling me more, paging me and paging me.” He took that as a type of threat. “Then eventually her and I had sex. But it wasn’t attraction sex to me. It was like me as a . . . almost like a sexual slave, saying: ‘I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this woman just to give her what she wants to get her out of my life,’ OK?
“Eventually, it just kept getting worse. She wouldn’t take no for an answer with me. It was almost like a fatal attraction.”
“Of those three women, Rebecca, Candace, and Angie—” Zimmerman had started to say.
“Yes,” Neal anticipated.
“Which one do you think you were the most attracted to?”
“Angie,” he answered almost before she finished the question. “Rebecca and I had a sexual relationship, but I was too much for Rebecca.”
Suddenly Neal said he had to use the rest room. “If I don’t go,” he said with a grin, “I’m going to be doing your carpet.”
When he returned, Aceves wanted to read him his rights a second time.
“Do we have to go through that again?” Neal protested. “I’m fine with talking to you guys.”
But Zimmerman picked up where her partner left off. “You realize you have the right to your lawyer at any time you want. And you have the right to stop at any time you like.”
Neal sighed. “Yes.” He looked at Aceves, who was Hispanic, and asked him if there was American Indian in his family. “Do you know about covering tracks?” he said. “I was good at covering things or putting so much shit out, pardon the French, that everybody—they thought they knew me, and they ain’t even stinking close. They don’t even know the first color of my hair. How do you know this ain’t dyed?”
Zimmerman replied, “I think I’ve heard you had blond hair for a while.”
Neal smiled. He could change his appearance easily, he said. “I’m growing a goatee,” he said, then teased, “It’s for me escaping, you see.” The investigators looked surprised. He quickly added, “I’m just kidding.”
He said that he’d once grown a goatee when his mother was in the cancer ward before her death. “I said I wasn’t going to shave my goatee until she was in the Lord’s arms. And she said, ‘You and Sir Walter Raleigh.’ ” His mother had asked him then to get her out of the ward, so he took her home to die. “So that’s why I’m growing this is because I plan on dying. Chances are I’ll be executed for this one. I deserve to be, not because I’m suicidal, I’m not.
“If I end up being that way, I know the people to call because I plan on going to Heaven, all right? That’s just my own religious belief. I do, because He’ll forgive those things. I mean, you know, it’s like you hear . . . the jailhouse thing: you get in trouble and you go to God. Well, that’s sometimes the only time that He’s able to get through your skull, all right?”
Neal hesitated when asked more about his relationship with his mother. “My mother killed me, OK, period,” he said as he choked up and wiped tears from his eyes.
“What do you mean she killed you?” Zimmerman asked.
“It’s love,” he sniffed. “You’ve just got to not talk about my mom.” He stopped, unable to go on. At last he whispered, “Let me catch my breath, OK? Do you mind? I’m sorry, I just, I don’t have a lot of patience for a lot of emotion with all the weight that I got on me.”
With a little prompting from the investigators, however, he admitted that after his mother’s death, he forged two checks against her account and stole some of her jewelry—because his siblings were “trying to cheat me. My mother let me know that they were going to write my ass off as soon as she was dead. Meaning she was the only thing that was keeping the wolves away from these greedy little children she had. She asked me what things of hers I wanted. And I said, ‘All I want is you, Mom.’ And that’s honestly what I wanted. I didn’t want her money or her furniture. I wanted my mother living, OK?”
If his mother were still alive, he said, she would have been there for him “in a heartbeat” despite what he’d done. “Now she would not pat me on the back. She wouldn’t dance and kick her heels. She would not say, ‘You did the right thing, killing those people.’ It would have probably killed her, but she would have still stood with me.”
Neal said that his mother had died on October 11, 1995, “just prior to me meeting Candace.” He wiped again at his eyes and apologized for the emotional display.
Zimmerman commiserated. “There’s nothing wrong with it, Cody.”
Aceves asked Neal if he believed his own lies. “No,” Neal replied. “I know the truth, all right? You know, my brother was the one that said, my brother, Phil, and I love him dearly, that I couldn’t con him. That’s bullshit. I’ve been conning him all my life.”
Neal promised that he was going to “separate for you what’s lies and what is the truth. And I will tell you that I have told you some hellacious lies at times, all right, to cover my ass, so I don’t disclose other areas that I don’t want you looking in yet, OK?”
The prisoner kept diverting into vague generalities, but the investigators pressed on. Aceves asked Neal how he was making a living in 1998.
“All the money I was getting was illegal,” Neal replied. He claimed to have been a cat burglar who stole jewelry, diamonds, and gold from stores and homes but would supply no specifics.
“Did Rebecca know that you were taking money out of her account?”
“Oh, yeah,” he answered. “She would make checks out to me, and I would cash them.”
When Aceves asked how much money he’d stolen from Holberton, Neal stalled. The detective pressed and the prisoner growled, “Be careful how many times you ask me for more, all right?”
Neal immediately thought better of copping an attitude, saying that he didn’t mean to be aggressive, and admitted to “better than twenty grand.” Aceves wasn’t letting him off so easy: “Based on our investigation, Cody, is it more like fifty, sixty grand?”
“It could be, sir,” Neal replied. He would need to spend some time focusing on Holberton to make sure that was accurate, he added.
Neal said that he was trying to avoid a jury trial because it might reflect on his victims’ reputations. “The public deserves to know there was a crime committed, and that I’m guilty,” he said. “But they don’t need to know about Rebecca’s sexual habits or how dirty she liked keeping her town home. . . . I wasn’t the only pig, OK?”
The money he used for strip clubs and limousines: “I think the only month that I ever counted how much money I blew in a month was twenty-two thousand dollars at a strip club. Just like, poof.” He boasted that he’d throw money over the rail onto the dance floor at the country-western bar, The Stampede, and laughed at the people below scrambling to pick up the money. “Then they’d look up and they’d see me there with some beautiful babes. See, people don’t want to be down there picking. . . . The smart ones don’t want to pick it up; they want to have it to throw.
“And then when I would throw that money, it’s like an investment. I would take a chance. I would throw this money, and a victim would come up, somebody that I could use, manipulate, get more money out of, you see?”
Neal admitted to taking money from Holberton’s account on the day that she died. Aceves asked him what it was used for and he replied, “Luring Suzanne and Angie and finishing this thing.”
He’d been thinking of how to carry out the murders for a week, maybe two, before he put his plan into effect. Part of what put him into “a tailspin,” as Aceves had described it, was being “stalked” by Candace Walters, though he denied that he was worried about Walters’s threat to contact Holberton, who was just a roommate, he’d told her, not a lover. “I warned Candace if she kept pressing it, she was going to die, OK? And Candace wouldn’t let go, man. She would not let up. She wanted a piece of my ass.”
The rumor that she wrote a letter in case something happened to her, Neal complained, was another instance of Walters breaking her promise not to talk about him. He said Walters was too angry to take his threat seriously.
A more important reason for the murder of Holburton, he claimed, was actually an act of kindness. He wanted the investigators to know, “I was never mean to Rebecca, never hurt Rebecca, never beat on her.”
In fact, he was doing Holberton a favor when he killed her. “I was trying to spare Rebecca the nightmare that her financial world might be coming to a close. Not that she was totally going to die, just her financial stability. She worked all her life to have that. . . . She was greedy; she wanted to retire from the phone company.” She had about $40,000 in taxes due that August and “Rebecca was going to wake up to this one-hundred-thousand-dollar nightmare and never be able to pay it back until she was sixty-five. She was going to be a slave. And, you know, I grieve over that.”
Aceves asked Neal how he viewed his sexuality.
“I don’t have a healthy sexuality,” Neal answered, “and I don’t believe that anybody could after being raped or molested, all right? I don’t even know what normal is; I haven’t known what normal is since childhood.”
“Do you feel a hatred towards women?” Aceves asked.
Neal furrowed his brow. “No, not that I am aware of,” he said, then paused before adding, “I mean, it’s not in my conscious mind. A psychiatrist might say deep down I hate women.”
“Do you have a hatred towards men who like other men based on what’s happened to you?”
“Oh, I did,” Neal agreed. “My brother will tell you I hated homosexuals with a passion.”
“You were never homosexual prior to the—” Aceves didn’t get to finish his question.
Neal was angry. “Never,” he growled. “Uh-uh. Hell no! No way!” But he quickly calmed down. To prove his point, he boasted that he lost count of his female sexual conquests “at a thousand” while still in his midtwenties.
Zimmerman asked if, perhaps, he was bitter toward Fite because she was trying to reconcile with Matt Rankin. Neal shook his head. “Angie didn’t die because she went and spent the night with Matt. That is not why Angie died, all right?
“I’ve had my wives. . . . All except for one wife cheated on me, OK? But Angie didn’t die because she cheated on me.”
One of his ex-wives, Jennifer Tate, he said, was lying to them when she claimed that he’d made almost no attempt to see their little girl since their breakup. “She has never let me see her,” he contended. “I have tried over and over again to see her. She is a liar. She has always punished me, thinking I cheated on her. She doesn’t deserve to be with me. I want to be free to do my shit.”
Neal described himself as loyal and felt bad that he “cheated” on Angie with Beth Weeks; he was also an attentive and sensitive lover. “Look, I’m not a womanizer. I’m not here to use you sexually. I have feelings and care for you, but if you think I’m using you and just sleeping with everybody else, take yourself and your bad ass out of here. I’m not here just for a piece of ass. I’m here for somebody to love me and love somebody else one on one.
“I was sensitive to them. I wouldn’t ask them to do something they didn’t like. But because of my experiences sexually, I could take them wherever they wanted to go and bring them back. I mean, I’ve been very open-minded with sex, or I would have been a stinking rapist and raping women, you know, and murdering them like Ted Bundy, so to speak, all through the years.
“I raped a woman. . . . If Suzanne were the only crime I ever did in my life, I would hope you would execute me for it. That’s how I feel about rape, OK? It was so wrong. Nor, like I told her, would it happen again. Nor am I a rapist. I don’t believe that I would ever rape another woman after the taste that I got on this issue, all right? It’s something that I can never feel like I’ve washed myself enough, just like them. I know what it felt like for it to happen to me. I felt dirty all my stinking life.”
He denied that tying Suzanne Scott to the mattress was a “bondage” thing. “Understand, it was meant to restrain a victim.” However, he conceded that he’d been into “light bondage” in the past.
Neal denied being sexually stimulated by the murders. “You know what?” he said, smiling as he shook his head. “That’s the most off-the-wall question I could think of. But, I mean, I’m sure it’s a good one in your business. First of all, murder and sex to me . . . I’m totally, like, ‘Wow, man!’ I mean, I never ever considered they go together . . . other than rape.
“It’s not like I had a woody raising the ax up and killing them, all right? Waste another second on that and you’re spinning your wheels. I executed them. I wanted them to go as quickly as possible.
“I was not thinking of sex in any way when I murdered Rebecca, Angie, or Candace. It had nothing to do with saying, ‘Look, bitch, for all the other ones who cheated on me in the past.’ . . . Now that would relate to sex. . . .”
Again Neal said that he “executed” his victims. “I wanted them to go as quickly as possible. And I believe that you both know that they had to have died very quick.”
Actually, the investigators knew that Neal’s assertion that his victims had died quickly with the first blow was not borne out by the examination of the bodies by forensic pathologist Ben Galloway. He did determine that Holberton probably died within the first few moments; the damage to her skull and brain had been devastating. However, Galloway had ascertained that both Candace Walters and Angela Fite had lived for several minutes after the attacks. How much pain they were feeling—what, if any, thoughts or fears may have gone through their minds—was anybody’s guess.
Zimmerman asked why he had picked a maul as the murder weapon. “Why that versus just an ax or just a sledgehammer?”
“Well, you know, I don’t know how to answer this,” Neal answered. He pondered the question for a moment longer, then asked, “Have you ever murdered anybody?”
“No,” Zimmerman replied.
“Have you?” he asked, turning to Aceves.
“No, I haven’t,” Aceves answered. “We just want to know why you chose a maul.”
Neal reminded them that the murders were neither a “vindictive act” nor a “sexual act.” “It was to put them out the best way I knew how, as quickly and as silently and as fairly as I could. . . . In fact, I believe, even though I haven’t yet experienced lethal injection, it was a lot more compassionate and fair to kill them like that. Even though it didn’t look real pretty, it was instant, OK?”
Demonstrating how he struck his victims, Neal raised his hands and brought them down in a chopping motion. “Meaning, boom, dead. And if they weren’t dead and just throbbing, so to speak, they sure as hell weren’t thinking about the pain.”
“Did you think how many times you’d have to hit them, Cody, in order to make it instant?” Aceves said.
“I knew I had to make the first one count to kill them right there . . . kill them and put them unconscious,” Neal answered.
“Did you have any idea where you had to hit them?”
“Oh, I knew where I had to hit them. . . . Where I was going was right dead center in the top of the head at first blow.”
“Always from the back?”
“Always from the back,” he replied. “See, I didn’t want these people to know what was coming because they were good people. . . . It was a mercy thing. It was, like, not wanting them to suffer. The paper said I tortured them, OK. I mean, if I wanted to torture them, I could have sat there and, I mean, I could have done all kinds of things. . . . I wanted them not to know. I mean Rebecca and I had just finished some champagne, you know; I had a surprise for her. Same with Candace.”
“And why the maul?” Zimmerman asked, coming back to her original question.
“Because it had weight to it. . . . I knew it would be enough to kill.”
Neal changed the subject. He wanted to set the record straight regarding reports from his family that he’d abused and killed small animals. The police were interested in this facet as many forensic psychiatrists maintain that there is a correlation between a trio of behaviors during childhood and adolescence that might identify potential serial killers. The three: bed-wetting, fire setting, and cruelty to animals, often in conjunction with sexual abuse.
The stories that his family told were half-truths and lies, he complained, such as the incident of him biting the head off a pet hamster. “The only hamster that I ever did kill was when I was older. It was a friend’s pet, and I reached in to pet him and it bit me. . . . I didn’t like meaness, ever. I’d had enough done to me. To protect myself, I went boom, like that, and killed him,” he said, indicating that he punched the hamster.
“Did you ever abuse any cats or dogs?” Aceves asked.
“Well, hell, yeah,” Neal replied as if that were a common behavior among all boys. But, he said, the story that his brother told them about pitchforking a cat “because I felt like it . . . Well, that was either his poor memory or a lie to make me look worse than I was.”
The truth, he said, was that “damn right I pitchforked that cat, all right? . . . I went in there and was going to pet the cat because I like animals. I always have. I pet them. I went over to pet him, and this cat tore into me. And my temper when I was young . . . Well, I grabbed this fork, and I just pitchforked this thing. . . . It’s like they put animals to sleep for biting somebody. I mean, what’s the difference? It attacked me; I defended myself; I killed it—simple as that.”
Then there was the cat that was owned by a girlfriend. It used to “attack” his feet when he was sleeping. He warned the young woman that if the cat kept it up, “I was going to kill it. I don’t never like anybody—and this is after I got out of the service—messing with me when I’m sleeping. Wake me up too sudden, you could expect—I mean I would consider killing you.” The unfortunate cat went after his feet again, so he grabbed his nunchakus—a martial arts weapon consisting of two sticks attached by a chain—and “tracked it down to the kitchen and killed it. And there was blood everywhere, man. . . . I told her to clean it up and went back to sleep.”
Aceves asked if those were the only cats he’d killed. No, Neal admitted, there’d been others “who were mean to me.”
Nor were the hamster and cats the only pets to suffer. “I had a dog that bit me one time, and I killed him, too. And then I had a puppy that bit me that I killed. The puppy was mean. It was just like something was wrong with him.”
“How did you kill him?” Aceves asked.
“I punched his brain in,” he said, “just, boom!”
His siblings said what they did because they were jealous of him, he said. “I was Mom’s favorite. I could get away with murder. Now they’re all stinkin’ lying. What’s new? Just like they want the electric chair to just get rid of me. Get what I deserve, right?”
However, he admitted that he’d continued killing animals as an adult, but that “killing animals was better than killing any more human beings, if that makes sense.”
The investigators knew that Neal once had a job as a truck driver that had him crisscrossing the country. “While you were doing that, Cody, did you ever kill anyone on the road?” Aceves asked. “I mean, going from state to state, nobody would ever know that you were—”
“No, no.” Neal shook his head. But, he added, it was a cover in case he had to “do some jobs.”
Neal denied any extensive drug use. He’d used cocaine or methamphetamine in the past, but on an irregular basis. He did like to drink, boasting that he’d done as many as twenty-seven shots of tequila at a sitting. He also bragged about his fighting prowess, including an incident with Beth Weeks’s husband before they were divorced. “I got him to where he got right in what I call my kill zone . . . close enough so I could chop him in the throat to finish him.” Weeks and Gerloff had intervened.
Overall, Neal was defensive about his toughness. Since his arrest, he’d been kept in isolation at the jail, as he’d demanded as one of the conditions for his surrender. He told investigators that it was to prevent him from killing anyone else, but his jailers figured it had more to do with his fears of what might happen to him if he was placed in the general population. Rapists and woman killers were not popular, even among other criminals, and Neal was no imposing physical specimen.
The investigators noted that Neal had promised all three murder victims a house. “How many other women did you do that with?” Zimmerman asked.
“I’d have to think about that one,” he replied. But first he wanted lunch and those cigarettes he’d asked for.
“Can I ask one more question?” Aceves asked.
“Yes, sir,” Neal replied.
Aceves wanted to know what would have happened to the bodies of the three women if they hadn’t been discovered on Wednesday. He was thinking of the two new footlockers and the unused saw next to them in the living room.
“I would like to answer that when we get off of break,” Neal said, “because you’re opening a real big door and probably one that’s worth at least an hour to get cleared up easy, OK? They wouldn’t have ended up being there. But then there would have been probably a bunch of other people killed that you don’t know about.”